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God in Winter

Description

Pádraig J. Daly’s latest collection of poems is set in a challenging place, “our unGodded world”, as one poem calls it, “our infected kingdom”, another. It is a place of darkness and heaviness of the soul, where things are left unfinished or in ruins and the sun goes down “protesting”.

But it is also a place that is somehow redeemed, a place made, if only momentarily, radiant by the perception of a greater design, by the vision of “a yellow ecstasy of leaves” in the street, and, most of all, by the guileless love and affection of the young whose laughter “lights / Every cobwebbed corner / Of our hearts”.

As in his previous books, God in Winter includes a number of Daly’s versions of early Irish poems, remarkable for their simplicity and lightness of touch. At a time when what might be called ‘poetry of faith’ goes against the prevailing fashion, Daly makes a distinctive ‘good news’ out of accumulated small perceptions that between them offer solace and seek to counterbalance the troubles of the human heart.

“In a limpid, luminous style couched in simple, accessible language and presenting as little more than fragments, Daly’s poems penetrate to the core of reality…” – Brendan Hoban, ACP.

ISBN 978 1 910251 06 5 Paperback 216 x 140 mm, 86 pp 2015

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Additional information

Weight

.15 kg

Dimensions

216 × 140 mm

Product Detail

ISBN: : 9781910251065

Size: : 216 x 140 mm

Pages: : 86 pp

Published: : February 2015

About The Author

Pádraig J. Daly was born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford in 1943 and works as an Augustinian priest in Dublin. He has published several collections of poetry, among them The Last Dreamers: New & Selected Poems (1999), The Other Sea (2003), Afterlife (2010) and God in Winter (2015). His translations include a selection from the Italian of Edoardo Sanguineti, Libretto (1999), which feature in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and Paolo Ruffilli's Joy and Mourning (reissued 2007), among others. Daly comments: "I write poetry as a way of understanding, questioning and celebrating God and the world." “Daly offers the most sustained attempt at serious religious poetry in Ireland and the distinct pleasure of the exquisite use of language.” — John F. Deane